Volume 24 · Number 3 · Spring 2007
A Century of Food Safety
It was 1906 — a watershed year for food safety in the United States. Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, establishing what would later become the Food and Drug Administration, and the public was enraged over atrocities of the meatpacking industry portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle.
On the other side of the country, the State Farm Commission purchased land just west of Sacramento that would become the University of California’s new “University Farm.”
And so UC Davis and the field of food safety have grown up together. Today campus researchers from a variety of disciplines are conducting research, training students and informing the public about myriad food-safety challenges.
“At the time the Pure Food and Drug Act was established, the concern was more about ‘adulterated’ food products — things like watering milk or putting sawdust in sausage,” says Dean Cliver, an expert on food- and water-borne diseases in the School of Veterinary Medicine. “It was a primarily cosmetic approach to food safety.”
Today, microbial contamination of food products is a chief concern, and experts in the field recognize that contamination can occur at many points throughout the food system — from the farmer’s field to the consumer’s kitchen — with disastrous consequences for human health.
During any given year, one in four Americans will be sickened by the food they eat, resulting in 76 million cases of food-borne illness in the United States, estimates the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 325,000 will be hospitalized for food poisoning, and 5,000 will die from those illnesses. The cost of medical expenses and lost wages is in the billions of dollars.
The main culprits are bacteria, viruses and parasites such as E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella, hepatitis A, Campylobacter, Shigella, norovirus and Listeria.
“People forget that we live in a microbial world,” says veterinarian Jim Cullor, director of UC Davis’ Veterinary Medical Teaching and Research Center in Tulare and the vet school’s Dairy Food Safety Laboratory. “That’s why food safety for the industry is like the ante in a poker game. If you don’t ante up with good food safety practices, you’re going to be out of the game.”
Cullor notes that the dairy industry has succeeded in developing procedures for preventing and detecting antibiotic and chemical contamination, and in using heat treatments, or pasteurization, to prevent microbial spoilage.
“Antibiotics are detected in less than one-tenth of a percent of the 600,000 tanker trucks of milk that California dairies produce each year,” Cullor said. “This milk is rejected by the processor, so it never reaches the consumer. And there have been virtually no incidents of food-safety concern in pasteurized milk for many decades.”
From milk to meat to fresh produce, the U.S. food system actually deserves high food-safety marks — perhaps an 8 or 9 on a 10-point scale, according to Cullor and other UC Davis food safety researchers.
“The food I bring home from the grocery stores is a lot safer than it was 20 years ago,” says Cliver, whose laboratory is currently studying how to detect and inactivate hepatitis A and norovirus in food and water, as well as bacterial contamination in Mexican-style sausage and other ethnic meats. “People feel that they are more at risk than they really are,” he said.
In the wake of the recent E. coli outbreaks in spinach and lettuce, the fresh-produce industry is pursuing food-safety solutions for its farming and processing operations that will be as successful as those developed by the dairy industry. And it is looking for ways to regain consumer confidence in its products, says Christine Bruhn, a Cooperative Extension consumer-marketing specialist. She assures them that, in time, their customers will come back.
“We see the same pattern in consumer reaction over and over again,” Bruhn says. “Initially people will just stop buying and there will be a decline in sales, but consumers will gradually go back to a product or a restaurant. It may take a few weeks or a few months.”
Consumers are very forgiving, but they do expect a renewed effort to prevent a recurrence,” Bruhn says. “They don’t want to die from eating healthy food — and that’s a reasonable expectation.”